CardiacProfileR: an R package for extraction and visualisation of heart rate profiles from wearable fitness trackers

A person9s heart rate profile, which consists of resting heart rate, increase of heart rate upon exercise and recovery of heart rate after exercise, is traditionally measured by electrocardiography during a controlled exercise stress test. A heart rate profile is a useful clinical tool to identify individuals at risk of sudden death and other cardiovascular conditions. Nonetheless, conducting such exercise stress tests routinely is often inconvenient and logistically challenging for patients. The widespread availability of affordable wearable fitness trackers, such as Fitbit and Apple Watch, provides an exciting new means to collect longitudinal heart rate and physical activity data. We reason that by combining the heart rate and physical activity data from these devices, we can construct a person9s heart rate profile. Here we present an open source R package CardiacProfileR for extraction, analysis and visualisation of heart rate dynamics during physical activities from data generated from common wearable heart rate monitors. This package represents a step towards quantitative deep phenotyping in humans. CardiacProfileR is available via an MIT license at https://github.com/VCCRI/CardiacProfileR.